Ed Caesar

The Moth and the Mountain (eBook, ePUB)

A True Story of Love, War, and Everest

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

"An outstanding book." The Wall Street Journal * "Gripping at every turn." Outside * "A hell of a ride." The Times (London) An extraordinary true story about one man's attempt to salve the wounds of war and save his own soul through an audacious adventure. In the 1930s, as official government expeditions set their sights on conquering Mount Everest, a little-known World War I veteran named Maurice Wilson conceives his own crazy, beautiful plan: he will fly a plane from England to Everest, crash-land on its lower slopes, then become the first person to reach its summitcompletely alone. Wilson doesn't know how to climb. He barely knows how to fly. But he has the right plane, the right equipment, and a deep yearning to achieve his goal. In 1933, he takes off from London in a Gipsy Moth biplane with his course set for the highest mountain on earth. Wilson's eleven-month journey to Everest is wild: full of twists, turns, and daring. Eventually, in disguise, he sneaks into Tibet. His icy ordeal is just beginning. Wilson is one of the Great War's heroes, but also one of its victims. His hometown of Bradford in northern England is ripped apart by the fighting. So is his family. He barely survives the war himself. Wilson returns from the conflict unable to cope with the sadness that engulfs him. He begins a years-long trek around the world, burning through marriages and relationships, leaving damaged lives in his wake. When he finally returns to England, nearly a decade after he first left, he finds himself falling in love once morethis time with his best friend's wifebefore depression overcomes him again. He emerges from his funk with a crystalline ambition. He wants to be the first man to stand on top of the world. Wilson believes that Everest can redeem him. This is the "rollicking" (The Economist) tale of an adventurer unlike any you have ever encountered: complex, driven, wry, haunted, and fully alive. He is a man written out of the history booksdismissed as an eccentric and gossiped about because of rumors of his transvestism. The Moth and the Mountain restores Maurice Wilson to his rightful place in the annals of Everest and tells an unforgettable story about the power of the human spirit in the face of adversity.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Simon + Schuster Inc.
• Seitenzahl: 288
• Erscheinungstermin: 17. November 2020
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781501143397
• Artikelnr.: 58606488

Autorenporträt

Ed Caesar is forty years old. He lives in Manchester, and writes for the New Yorker. He has won eleven major journalism awards - including a British Press Award, PPA Writer of the Year and the 2014 Foreign Press Award for Journalist of the Year. His subjects have included conflict in central Africa, the world's longest tennis match, stolen art, money-laundering, and the trade in diamonds. His first book, Two Hours, won a Cross Sports Book Award in 2016.

Rezensionen

'Ed Caesar has written a slim, ravishing chronicle that is absolutely bursting with life - doomed romance, the dread of the battlefield, the lure of adventure, hair-raising tales of amateur aviation, and, above all, the beauty and madness of the quest to ascend Earth's tallest summit. Maurice Wilson is as rich and full of surprise and contradiction as a character in a novel, and through painstaking historical research, Caesar brings his hero back to vivid life in all his messy, inspiring, ultimately tragic glory. A major feat of reporting and elegant storytelling' Patrick Radden Keefe, author of the Orwell Prize-winning Say Nothing